You’ll see lots more about that in a future post, but this post will be about comparing my new Huawei Watch D2 to my former Amazfit GTS 2 Mini watch bought in 2021.
Why did I choose the Amazfit GTS 2 Mini back in 2021?
Before 2021, I hadn’t worn a watch since I stopped whilst attending Hull University in the late 1990s. Around then, mobile phones became good enough and reliable enough that you could be assured that when you checked them, they wouldn’t have run out of battery, they’d tell you an accurate time, and their alarm clock was usually reliable (the Nokia’s back then occasionally forgot to alarm, but it was rare). So having to bother with a watch was hassle, and I just stopped wearing mine which was a badly scratched wound up mostly plastic thing (which I still have, and it still works!).
Anyway, from about 2020 onwards smart watches began to not suck sufficiently well I began to think about buying one, and when Amazfit launched the GTS 2 Mini in 2021 I gave it three months to ensure it wouldn’t be a dud, and I bought one. The things I wanted the most at the time were:
- Non-negotiable: It needed to work with Gadgetbridge, which is the enthusiast open source phone companion software which stores all your data on device in easy to extract SQLite databases. To be specific, it needed to work without the proprietary vendor app which uploads all your personal data to a cloud for somebody to monetise.
- Must have: I didn’t want to ever notice it being on me, including at night time asleep. I was coming from zero watch, and 99% of the smart watches until then were big bulky heavy things which would have annoyed me.
- Must have: I didn’t want to have to charge it more than once per week. Only the relatively featureless watches like a Pebble until then lasted a week on a single charge. Anything with slightly more features usually needed recharging daily, which was a showstopper for me.
- Must have: I wanted an always on display, because the ones which turn on when you raise your hand annoy me. That almost certainly implied an AMOLED screen, which had only just began to be fitted to the budget end of smart watches in 2021.
- Nice to have: I wanted GPS tracking to accurately track my exercise which Gadgetbridge would record over time.
- Nice to have: A barometer, so the GPS tracking is useful when climbing mountains with the children e.g. GPS shows you spent two hours walking 1 km, when in fact you climbed 600 metres as well!
The Amazfit GTS 2 Mini supplied all the above and plenty more in a 19 gramme package and 1.55 inch display for at the time €85 inc VAT delivered. I was genuinely pleased with the device – I even bought Megan the reduced cost edition the following year which uses a LCD display instead of the AMOLED display and she is also very happy with it.
Unfortunately in July the screen popped off! What had happened is that the battery had swollen, and they had cleverly designed that to pop off the front to let you know you can’t use the device any more. Its battery life had recently been on the wane in any case having shrunk to three and a bit days down from five and a bit days when new (this is with the display always on, and me doing a few exercises with it per week), so I knew a replacement was coming sooner rather than later. The screen popping off just made replacing it more urgent.
Why did I choose the Huawei Watch D2?
Due to being unemployed, I had more time than usual to choose a replacement and I spent a good few days ooming and awwing over what direction I wanted to choose next. Should I choose another Amazfit? They had evolutionarily improved since 2021, albeit at added cost. But so had Gadgetbridge which now supported a much wider range of devices. One category of those stood out: Huawei/Honor devices paired immediately with Gadgetbridge without having to do any auth key extraction dance from the manufacturer’s cloud service. The fact they ‘just worked’ out of the box with Gadgetbridge was attractive. Huawei watches were also bleeding edge in terms of bang for the buck, they were very aggressively pushing superb hardware, constantly genuinely improving software, all at rapidly discounting prices over time after launch.
My list of must haves and nice to haves above hadn’t changed, though finding a new watch with a similar featureset to the GTS 2 Mini for under twenty grammes of weight has become hard. It came down to between the 30g Huawei Watch Fit 4 for €133 inc VAT, the 30g Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro for €257 inc VAT, or the 40g Huawei Watch D2 for €278 inc VAT. The latter had one very standout feature: genuine true blood pressure monitoring! It implements this using an inflatable bag under the watch strap, and to my best knowledge, there is absolutely no other watch on the market right now which gives as accurate blood pressure readings as that watch.
Otherwise it is basically the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro with a bigger battery (524 mAh vs 400 mAh), albeit with a chunk more weight and size to accommodate the micro air pump and larger battery.
I’ll admit I did sleep on that decision for two nights. Such a big, bulky, watch was a gamble. I was also fairly sure that the inflatable bag would irritate my skin with sweat, so I wondered if buying it wouldn’t be a waste of money if I couldn’t wear the thing.
Eventually I did plump for the Huawei Watch D2, and having worn it for over a month now I’ve gotten used to it and I think it’s great – though I was right about the plastic bag upsetting my skin, but more on that shortly.
Here is the Huawei Watch D2 on my arm, it is a big, chunky, watch. Note the brown leather strap …
Yes that is an aftermarket leather strap fitted to it! The Chinese are great for aftermarket accessories, and Aliexpress has the right adapters to convert the proprietary Huawei strap mount into a conventional 22 mm watch strap. That solves my skin irritation problem.
I’ll get into it more shortly, however random blood pressure measurements aren’t all that useful. What you really want is blood pressure sampled regularly many times over a single day or week. Thanks to a quick strap change facility on the watch, I can very easily pop on and off the inflatable bag strap and I can swap one strap for another in under a minute. So when I need to do a blood pressure monitoring, it’s very easy. It also reduces the wear on the inflatable bag strap which doesn’t seem to me likely to last a year if the watch is being constantly removed and put back on – which you do really need to do for showers, because thanks to that mini air pump, despite Huawei’s claims user reviews are clear it’s best to not immerse this particular watch in water.
Finally I’ll mention now one particular unpleasant surprise with this watch: the supplied strap is NOT the one in units supplied to internet reviewers. It is this crap thing:
The strap which internet reviewers reviewed has a second metal piece attached to that first piece which lets you quickly and easily remove and fit the watch as it’s like a quick release lever. What consumers actually get on purchase (I am not the only one according to Amazon and Aliexpress reviews) is half the metal quick release lever which is now fused onto the sliding clasp.
Getting this strap on and off is therefore an absolute royal pain in the ass. My hand is nearly too big to fit through with the strap at its widest, so a lot of pressure gets put onto where the bag connects to the strap. It’ll be fine if you use this strap once per month. But daily, no it would rip the bag before long.
Hence if you’re considering buying this watch, buy an aftermarket strap with it and factor that into the cost.
Comparing the Huawei Watch D2 to the Amazfit GTS 2 Mini
| Huawei Watch D2 | Amazfit GTS 2 Mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost in 2025 euros | €278 inc VAT delivered | €101 inc VAT delivered |
| Dimensions | 48 x 38 x 13 | 41 x 36 x 9 |
| Battery | 524 mAh | 220 mAh |
| Battery life when new (with display always on) | ~7 days | ~6 days |
| Display size | 1.82 inches | 1.55 inches |
| Display resolution | 480 x 408 | 354 x 306 |
| Display | 1500 nits AMOLED | 450 nits AMOLED |
| Features |
|
|
I’ve highlighted three things above because I think they especially stand out: firstly, the ambient light sensor is a very simple addition, yet it means that the display can go full brightness outdoors thus curing one of my biggest problems with the Amazfit – I couldn’t make out its screen at all in sunshine, which meant blindly tapping at the screen to start an outdoor cycle, which was annoying when I mistapped and it didn’t start the exercise recording. That light sensor goes the other way too – as I live in a cold place, I usually have a sleeved top on which covers the watch. The darkness means it can dial down the brightness of the always on display, and I get nothing like the hit to battery life that all the warning messages from Huawei claim when you turn on the always on display in the settings.
The second big standout thing in my opinion is the Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABMP). If you have high blood pressure like me, you will be aware that you have to take your blood pressure at the same times of day every day for a week to get a reliable sample. This has two big problems:
- It’s rare you’ll have the time to take your blood pressure when you’re stressed e.g. in the day job. So you’ve no idea what the effects of your day job are on your blood pressure.
- You have no idea what your sleeping blood pressure is.
I mentioned above that the blood pressure monitoring was the thing which swung me to the D2, but I ought to explain why as it won’t be obvious: to measure your night time blood pressure, you basically have to sleep with two arm cuffs on, and the machine will pump both every thirty minutes and choose the one which you’re not lying upon. This means tubes going all around you, never mind the discomfort of the arm cuffs, so you don’t sleep particularly well and unsurprisingly then your sleep blood pressure reading is way off. This watch promised peaceful night time blood pressure monitoring. That’s worth money, and it’s why I forked out.
Finally, the third big standout thing isn’t for people like me, but rather for people like Megan who when they go jogging, they don’t like taking their phone because it’s big and may get rained upon. If they listen to music while they run, the ability to have the watch feed music to your headphones is a killer app. Megan has to bring her phone with her to get that music supply, and she really doesn’t care for it. So for those who hate jogging with your smartphone attached like her, this is a standout feature.
Comparing the two watches side by side physically:
Obviously the Huawei is about 3x the cost of the Amazfit, so of course you’d expect more and better everything for the added cost. And while I’m not entirely sure if that added cost would be worth it for most people, for people with high blood pressure like me, it’s an absolute eye opener as we shall see next.
What I didn’t know until now about my high blood pressure
Firstly, I should mention that at the time of writing, Gadgetbridge has no support for:
- Blood pressure
- ECG
- Arterial stiffness
The latter two don’t enable themselves on the watch unless you first pair the watch with Huawei’s app so it can do a region check, and turn on the features permitted in your region. After that you can do the auth key extraction dance from the Huawei cloud as per Gadgetbridge wiki instructions, and you’re good to go.
There are active open tickets for supporting these in Gadgetbridge, and there is a PR implementing blood pressure recording so I don’t doubt these things will get supported in time. However, for now, you’ll have to manually transcribe from the watch into a spreadsheet which isn’t too painful, and the watch does have a pretty good GUI:
Once it’s into a spreadsheet, you can graph it! Here is most of a ABMP measurement done on the 1st September where blood pressure was measured every thirty minutes at night time, and every forty-five minutes at day time:
As it was before Megan’s birthday, I was still drinking alcohol and due to unemployment and the amazing weather this summer, I’ll admit I was drinking alcohol most days. I didn’t drink alcohol on the 1st until just before bed, so what you’re seeing is the effects of alcohol the night before on blood pressure the next day.
Let’s compare that to a ABMP taken on the 16th September after I’d been completely off the alcohol for two weeks:
The 16th was like a day job for me: I worked a full day in front of the computer coming up with an outhouse construction detail, which is why I chose that day for the ABMP test (the few missing results are because the watch ran low on battery, so I had to go charge it)
Comparing the two is a bit of an eye opener – on the 1st, systolic pressure was well above 125 mmHg and diastolic pressure usually above 85 mmHg. Not good! But for the 16th – despite me getting quite stressed about the outhouse detail especially getting late into the night as I was running out of time – systolic pressure was generally well under 125 mmHg. Diastolic pressure wasn’t much better than on the 1st until after I finished work for the day, then it dropped like a stone to around 75 mmHg (and the systolic to around 118 mmHg).
This is why, dear readers, that regular consumption of alcohol is not good for your blood pressure in general! Which is why I go teetotal between the summer and Christmas, and then between Christmas and the summer each year. It gives my whole system an opportunity to heal, restore balance, and basically return to health.
All the said, I have learned that a day job is about as bad for your blood pressure as drinking alcohol daily. I guess that makes sense. Combining the two is even worse for you.
The other less good news from this is that my night time blood pressure isn’t great: around 115 mmHg for systolic and 76 mmHg for diastolic. The systolic is okay, but the diastolic should be below 70. As I’ve often mentioned on here before, my diastolic blood pressure appears non-linearly related to my weight – if I go much above 76 kg, diastolic blood pressure rises markedly and gets much worse with every added kilogram.
For all these reasons I really do need to lose weight and get back to pre-covid weight. I’ve redoubled my efforts on that since the kids went back to school, and I’ve begun to notice my belt is getting a bit loose which is a good sign.
What does the inside of a smart watch look like?
I have been promising for a few posts a photo of the inside of the Amazfit watch seeing as its screen had usefully popped itself off:
I still need to disassemble it still further – I’d like to see what else is in there seeing as this will be going to recycling sooner rather than later. Doing so is on my todo list – to be honest, I haven’t had the time recently! Today I had to fully finish migrating off my old phone before I go to Spain which took longer than expected (I had to go review all the pictures I’d taken in the past three years as part of the backup and migration process), and I also had to do my British tax return as the submission final date is next month and it needs to be posted before I go to Spain. I also dealt with a bunch of other small items today and indeed have been doing so all this week … ultimately all those were higher priority and disassembling this watch legitimately can wait until I get back from Spain, so I shall do exactly that.
What things about the Huawei Watch D2 are worse than the Amazfit GTS 2 Mini?
I thought I should end with a list of things which are in my opinion definitely worse in the Huawei watch than the Amazfit watch. It isn’t a long list, and it’s all software so who knows maybe some AI crawler will report these back to Huawei or something.
As I mentioned above, I loathe them baiting and switching us on the quick release metal clasp in the strap. I think that very dishonourable of them. If the reviewer got the quick release mechanism on the bundled strap, so should the customers. Anything else is just dishonest.
I definitely find choosing a function on the Huawei more hassle than on the Amazfit. You have this scrollable menu of items three wide with a nice Mac OS type zoom effect. It looks very nice. But it still takes me longer to navigate than the simpler less fancy looking menu on the Amazfit. That makes using the watch slower and more awkward than it could be.
I don’t like how the Timer app works on the Huawei. When the time is up, it keeps buzzing at you until you shut it up, then it resets the time which means if you’re cooking something and you need another two or three minutes, you have to go back in and manually start another timer. In the Amazfit, it buzzed until you acknowledged it, then it carries on the countdown into negative time until you manually reset the countdown. If you just need another two minutes for cooking, that is very convenient and ergonomic. There is also another annoyance: on the Amazfit you can set custom timer durations and it’ll remember them. On the Huawei, you can’t, so I have to plug twenty minutes into the custom timer each and every time which is annoying. And very avoidable.
I find transferring music onto the Huawei very tedious because it can only transfer over Bluetooth, and it takes an absolute age. You therefore end up transferring music exactly once and not changing what’s on the watch. This feels avoidable.
Finally, it’s a small thing, but the list of available cards when you swipe left and right on the main display feels both less useful and worse presented than on the Amazfit. On both those watches the cards and their ordering are configurable, but the ones Amazfit lets you choose from are just … better. On the Amazfit, I’d regularly swipe left and right because what I found was useful to me. On the Huawei, I’m very much meh! The only vaguely useful card is the weather forecast, and you wouldn’t use that in Ireland for today because the rain radar is vastly more useful. It feels – again – avoidable.
What’s next?
I’ll be taking my new Google Pixel Pro 9 for a good testing while in Spain. Expect many high gamut photos on here when I return!
Theoretically, we might have some finished house foundation plans to show and talk about here not long after I return. Here’s hoping!
Ok, time to eat and then start packing my bags! I leave on train early tomorrow morning, and I should get into Madrid not too late Friday evening. See you all in a few weeks!
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